What is the Bloomsbury Project?

The Leverhulme-funded UCL Bloomsbury Project was established to investigate 19th-century Bloomsbury’s development from swampy rubbish-dump to centre of intellectual life

Led by Professor Rosemary Ashton, with Dr Deborah Colville as Researcher, the Project has traced the origins, Bloomsbury locations, and reforming significance of hundreds of progressive and innovative institutions

Many of the extensive archival resources relating to these institutions have also been identified and examined by the Project, and Bloomsbury’s developing streets and squares have been mapped and described

This website is a gateway to the information gathered and edited by Project members during the Project’s lifetime, 1 October 2007–30 April 2011, with the co-operation of Bloomsbury’s institutions, societies, and local residents

Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project

Cartoon satirising the British College of Health

Bloomsbury Institutions

Bloomsbury Streets, Squares, and Buildings

Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project

Prince Augustus Frederick, 11th Duke of Sussex (1773–1843)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was the sixth son of George III

Unlike his brothers, he was interested in intellectual pursuits and in reform, supporting the anti-slavery movement and speaking in the House of Lords in favour of the removal of disabilities of Jews, Catholics, and dissenters

He was elected president of the Society of Arts in 1816 and of the Royal Society in 1830, and was one of a small number of independent-minded peers who supported the founding of the secular University of London (later University College London), agreeing to lay the foundation stone on 30 April 1827

At the ceremony, which, according to The Times, attracted at least 2,000 spectators, the Duke noted the important principle of the new university’s openness to non-Anglicans and expressed the hope that its founding would “excite the old Universities [Oxford and Cambridge] to fresh exertions, and force them to reform abuses” (The Times, 1 May 1827)

He was then praised by the Catholic Duke of Norfolk as a “friend of the arts and the patron of every liberal institution in the metropolis” (The Times, 1 May 1827)

For more general biographical information about Augustus Frederick, 11th Duke of Sussex, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography